Tokens get cheaper, the bill keeps growing: OpenRouter spend hits $47M a day

Cheap flash models pulled the gateway's traffic their way and dragged down the average token price. The Tidelines.ai index fell from 600 points in January to the low 300s, meaning the average token got half as expensive in a year.

Then and now. At the start of the year about 1 trillion tokens a day went through OpenRouter; now it is 23 trillion. Spend tripled to $47 million a day, the highest in the gateway's history. The price fell, the bill grew.

Where to check for yourself. The index is the weighted output-token price of the top 20 models, with 100 points set at January 2025. The Tidelines.ai dashboard is free and recalculated daily from archived snapshots of OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway. As of Oct 8, 2026, it shows minus 12% quarter over quarter.

Price cuts come back as demand. GPT-5.6 Luna got about 80% cheaper, after which usage grew 14x and the model's revenue rose 34%. Non-frontier models carry 84% of the platform's tokens, with a 40:1 price spread between the top and the bottom.

The gateway mostly carries agent traffic, so the index measures the agent market, not all of AI. Tokens here do not equal money: Anthropic runs 12–15% of OpenRouter tokens and takes about half of the platform's money.

Next, the index hits the cheap bottom of the platform: below $0.03 per million output tokens there is nowhere left to fall.